Re: 1.5.21-1 Release: Windows memory resources do not recover.

[Dave Silvia <dsilvia at mchsi dot com>]

> -- On Thu, 07 Dec 2006 06:36:05 -0700 Eric Blake wrote --
>
>> Are you SURE you don't have a buggy driver installed?  Known
>> culprits include Agnitum outpust, Mcafee virus scanners, Logitech
>> webcam, ...  In other words, the leak is not caused by cygwin, but
>> by your buggy driver leaking memory for every process spawned by
>> your process-intensive scripts.


The list you gave above has an ellipsis, usually denoting there are more. Is
there a place where this list is kept? I'd like to know because I'd like to see
if the one I found that ultimately caused the problem is on that list.

It was not apparent because examination of installed and running services and
drivers showed the software to be present in Safe and Normal mode and
operational in both. It would appear that there must be something internal in
the software that senses Safe mode and keeps it from operating. At least, that's
the only explanation I can come up with, since it was installed, functional, and
running in both modes.

At any rate, after doing some extensive system analysis with various tools I
determined that I had no malicious software of any sort on the system, so the
problem had to be coming from "bona-fide" software, i.e., one that has no bad
reps (known) for being crappy.

I eliminated Kaspersky, the problem persisted. I eliminated Paragon Partition
Manager, the problem persisted. I eliminated Norton's Partition Magic, the
problem persisted. I eliminated Webroot Spysweeper, the problem persisted.

These,then, were all pretty much exonerated. I then came to PCTools. Their
Spyware Doctor has a fairly large suite of drivers/services/BHO's. Et, voila!,
once I uninstalled it and rebooted, the problem went away.

So, if there is a list of possible culprits and Spyware Doctor is not on that
list, it needs to be (at least, version 4.0). This is a shame because it is
(imo) the marginally better of the two best (again, imo) antispyware packages:
itself and Webroot's Spysweeper.

I've notified PCTools of the problem and hopefully (since I do have a vested
[$'s] interest) they will address this problem aggressively and expediently.
If/when they do, I'll post again so that they may be removed from the list (at
least from the point of the fix release on).

Thank you to those (including the above quoted) who patiently and helpfully kept
pointing toward a solution to this problem.

thx,
Dave S.

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